>Brad De Long wrote:
>
> > Goldhagen is trying to understand why it was the case during World
> > War II if you took a random German adult or adolescent male, gave him
> > a gun, and had an authority figure tell him to "shoot those jews,"
> > the odds were better than nine out of ten that he would do so.
interesting thing is, i lived with immigrants from germany for a while. way before i knew sociology or marxist theory. one thing that always stuck in my head: it was never about shooting jews, for them, but about being GERMAN. it was about a pride in germany.
and this hit home to me when i went to grad school. the guy who recruited me there, manfred stanley, he was a refugee from germany. he can tell you, as can some of his refugee friends whom i met over some interesting dinner parties, that one of the more profound things about being a young jewish german was that you were caught up in the nationalist frenzy too and the notion that your jewishness was a problem wasn't at the forefront like we may think. and, unlike goldhagen, these folks seem to have a much better grasp on the complexity of it all, as well as the fact that, as several people pointed out, germany was not or is not unique. the german historians methodenstreit that dominated intellectual circles in the 80s is a good place to scope out the contours of the debate and the implications of an argument like goldhagen's which just plain reeks even without that bad scholarship.
where the fuck is angela anyway????
kelley